The Adaptec Series 7 RAID adapter family features PMCs 24 port PM8015 RAID-on-Chip (ROC), which combines a x8 PCIe Gen3 interface with 6Gb/s SAS ports to enable a new generation of high- performance RAID adapters that are unmatched by any other ROC in the industry. Adaptec Series 7 RAID adapters is available with 24 native SAS/SATA ports.While the PCIe Gen3 interface doubles bandwidth to the host compared to PCIe Gen2, it requires at least 16 6Gb/s SAS/SATA ports to double the bandwidth to the storage devices. Competing 6Gb/s solutions have only 8 ports, and cannot leverage that advantage. Series 7 adapters perform at up to 6.6 GB/s on sequential reads and up to 2.6 GB/s on sequential writes on parity RAID 5, more than doubling the performance of competing host-based RAID adapters. With 16 direct-connected solid-state drives (SSDs), Series 7 adapters can deliver up to 450,000 IOPS – nearly 10x the performance of previous-generation RAID adapters. Adaptec RAID Code (ARC) delivers maximum reliability with RAID levels 0, 1, 1E, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 (71605E supports 0, 1, 1E, and 10, only) . ARC also offers RAID Level Migration (the ability to easily migrate RAID levels), Online Capacity Expansion (expand capacity without powering down the server), and Copyback Hot Spare (when a failed drive has been replaced, data is automatically copied from the hot spare back to the restored drive). New to Series 7 is its auto configuration capability. Users can operate in HBA mode (expose drives to the host directly) or Simple Volume mode (use fast DRAM cache to reduce latency and improve performance), without the need to use setup tools. In RAID mode, they can mix and match all devices and handle them at the same time.